Alternative methods of monitoring emerging contaminants in water: a review

Sensors for Emerging Water Contaminants: Overcoming Roadblocks to Innovation

Ensuring water quality and safety requires the effective detection of emerging contaminants, which present significant risks to both human health and the environment. Field deployable low-cost sensors provide solutions to detect contaminants at their source and enable large-scale water quality monitoring and management. Unfortunately, the availability and utilization of such sensors remain limited. This Perspective examines current sensing technologies for detecting emerging contaminants and analyzes critical barriers, such as high costs, lack of reliability, difficulties in implementation in real-world settings, and lack of stakeholder involvement in sensor design. These technical and nontechnical barriers severely hinder progression from proof-of-concepts and negatively impact user experience factors such as ease-of-use and actionability using sensing data, ultimately affecting successful translation and widespread adoption of these technologies. We provide examples of specific sensing systems and explore key strategies to address the remaining scientific challenges that must be overcome to translate these technologies into the field such as improving sensitivity, selectivity, robustness, and performance in real-world water environments. Other critical aspects such as tailoring research to meet end-users' requirements, integrating cost considerations and consumer needs into the early prototype design, establishing standardized evaluation and validation protocols, fostering academia-industry collaborations, maximizing data value by establishing data sharing initiatives, and promoting workforce development are also discussed. The Perspective describes a set of guidelines for the development, translation, and implementation of water quality sensors to swiftly and accurately detect, analyze, track, and manage contamination.

A state-of-art-review on emerging contaminants: Environmental chemistry, health effect, and modern treatment methods

Pollution problems are increasingly becoming e a priority issue from both scientific and technological points of view. The dispersion and frequency of pollutants in the environment are on the rise, leading to the emergence have been increasing, including of a new class of contaminants that not only impact the environment but also pose risks to people's health. Therefore, developing new methods for identifying and quantifying these pollutants classified as emerging contaminants is imperative. These methods enable regulatory actions that effectively minimize their adverse effects to take steps to regulate and reduce their impact. On the other hand, these new contaminants represent a challenge for current technologies to be adapted to control and remove emerging contaminants and involve innovative, eco-friendly, and sustainable remediation technologies. There is a vast amount of information collected in this review on emerging pollutants, comparing the identification and quantification methods, the technologies applied for their control and remediation, and the policies and regulations necessary for their operation and application. In addition, This review will deal with different aspects of emerging contaminants, their origin, nature, detection, and treatment concerning water and wastewater.

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) as efficient catalytic tools for the oxidative degradation of 4-nonylphenol and its by-products

Water pollution is a current global concern caused by emerging pollutants like nonylphenol (NP). This endocrine disruptor cannot be efficiently removed with traditional wastewater treatment plants (WTPs). Therefore, this work aimed to evaluate the adsorption influence of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) on the oxidative degradation (ozone and ultraviolet irradiations) of 4-nonylphenol (4-NP) and its by-products as a coadjuvant in WTPs. MIPs were synthesized and characterized; the effect of the degradation rate under system operating conditions was studied by Box-Behnken response surface design of experiments. The variables evaluated were 4-NP concentration, ozone exposure time, pH, and MIP amount. Results show that the MIPs synthesized by co-precipitation and bulk polymerizations obtained the highest retention rates (> 90%). The maximum adsorption capacities for 4-NP were 201.1 mg L-1 and 500 mg L-1, respectively. The degradation percentages under O3 and UV conditions reached 98-100% at 120 s of exposure at different pHs. The degradation products of 4-NP were compounds with carboxylic and ketonic acids, and the MIP adsorption was between 50 and 60%. Our results present the first application of MIPs in oxidation processes for 4-NP, representing starting points for the use of highly selective materials to identify and remove emerging pollutants and their degradation by-products in environmental matrices.